أَلَمْ أَنْهَكُمَا عَن تِلْكُمَا الشَّجَرَةِ'a-lam 'anhākumā `an tilkumā ššajarati?Did I not forbid you from that tree?

It's not hard to come up with a story for how this grammatical phenomenon could have emerged: li in Arabic means "to" or "for", and the endings it takes are (with one exception) the same as those above, so it could easily have either conveyed a presentative meaning (compare English expressions like "That's London for you!") or, less probably in this case, indicated proximity to the addressee ("Get me that book next to you"). But I have a question for all you wonderful readers who have gotten this far: do you know of any other language that does something like this?

wow, that's fascinating... I hadn't really ever payed so close attention to those alternative demonstratives, since usually I can't keep track of all the different variations in Qur'anic Arabic. It took the wild gesticulations of our beloved Shaykh (that was Sha'rawi wasn't it?) to hammer the point home, though. As for comparisons, I can't think of any weird demonstratives except a vague recollection of some strange Late Latin agreement issues, but that was probably just because of proximity...

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